


Strange Kind of Passion

by duckbunny



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, No Sex, Non-Sexual Kink, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Flagellation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-04-23 05:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19144471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/pseuds/duckbunny
Summary: There are certain things proper to angels, and trying the new ways of penance the humans devise is one of them. Only sometimes, it also helps to have a friend.





	1. Chapter 1

Crowley found the angel in a miserable little monastery on a rock in the North Sea. He liked monasteries, generally. They were full of self-important men with tiny kingdoms, of tempers frayed by work and closeness, petty annoyances magnified to feuds by repetition. There was a lot to work with in a monastery.

He did _not_ like having to cross damp sand causeways in the gaps between high tides, especially when the moon was mostly hidden by clouds. Storms could blow up suddenly in these waters and while a swim didn’t have to hurt him, he resented the possibility of being swept away. It would be uncomfortably like a metaphor, and Crowley hated those. God’s little jokes were never really funny.

The monks had not entirely tamed their island. There was a flock of sheep watching him, dark shapes in the darker night, but the grass beneath them was coarse from salt and thistles poked up in the ditches. Crowley followed the bare earth of the road, up to the rough stone walls. He could feel the thorny prickle of the monastery church, as sharp as those thistles underfoot, a bristling threat perpetually raised against him. That was to be expected. If he was lucky, it would only be the sanctuary that was consecrated. He could sneak his way into the dormitories, tempt some sleeping monks and steal a boat on the way out. Easy job.

It’s not difficult to break in to a building locked only with a sliding bolt when you can do minor miracles on command. Crowley strolled through the silent corridors in sandals and a black woollen robe, just like a local, provided nobody looked too closely for the cross he wasn’t wearing. It wouldn’t shock anyone to see a brother wandering to the privy in the night. He usually made the effort to blend in, even if there was nobody awake to see.

Almost nobody. In one barren little cell, separated from the dormitories by a stretch of cold corridor and probably kept for visitors, a man in the white habit of the Cistercians was scourging himself.

Crowley leant against the wall to watch him. He’d left the cell door open to catch what little moonlight came in across the corridor, so it was easy to lurk in a shadow and go unnoticed. The monk was stripped to the waist with his habit folded down over his belt, pale skin shifting over soft muscles. There were red streaks on his shoulders from the whip. His aim wasn’t very good and Crowley smirked at him trying to get the thing to strike his own back, until he hit his ear in passing and gasped in pain.

There was something familiar about that gasp.

Crowley squinted at the blond man in the patchy moonlight and said, “Aziraphale?”

The angel started. He looked over his reddened shoulder, his eyes wide, trying to hide some obscure guilt. “Crowley! What are you doing here?”

“Nothing to do with you. Some routine temptation Head Office wanted done. What are _you_ doing here?”

“I’m a visiting monk,” Aziraphale said. “From another order. Just here to compare notes on how things should be done, give them a bit of a helping hand, you know. They’re on the edge of the world out here and a little divine guidance never hurts.”

Crowley pushed himself off the wall. “Never mind that. What are you doing with _that_?”

The angel glanced at the whip in his hand. “Ah. Well, it’s this new thing they’re doing. They call it “flagellation”. It’s meant to be very good for the soul. Penance, all that kind of thing. So I thought I’d test it out, see if there's anything to it.”

“Is it working?”

“Ah. Well. It’s – You know, we really can’t talk right now, we’ll wake someone up.”

Crowley concentrated for a moment, pulling the barest hint of demonic power over the dormitories. “No, we won’t. They’ll sleep until the bells. What are you _doing_ , if it doesn’t work?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s just – every time I start to get somewhere, I muck it up. Lose the rhythm. There’s something there but I can’t seem to reach it.”

“Well, no wonder, if you keep hitting yourself in the ear. Let me see that.”

Aziraphale lets him take the whip. It’s a rough leather thing, untidy straps cut with points on the end and wrapped into a bundle at one end. The strands are all different lengths and the whole thing twists unevenly in his hand. “No wonder you can’t aim it right. Turn around.”

The angel stares at him. “Why?”

“Well, unless you want me to hit you in the face? I don’t know, it might be more holy that way-”

“What? Why are _you_ going to hit me?”

Crowley smiled. That is, he bared his teeth. “I’ve seen them _flagellating_. They usually do it with two people.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale swallowed. “Alright. Wait- What are _you_ getting out of this?”

Crowley gestured broadly. When this did not seem to communicate his meaning, he said, “I’m going to hit one of the enemy with a whip.”

“Oh. I suppose that does make sense.”

“And you’re doing a holy penance. We both get something out of it. Come on, don’t you want to know what it feels like?”

Aziraphale hesitantly turned his back. “Yes,” he said.

“Do you want, I don’t know, put your hands on the wall or something? Brace yourself?”

“No. It’s about – endurance.”

Crowley shrugged. “If you say so, angel.” He swung the whip in a circle, feeling the leather bundle shifting around itself. Use this for too long and you’d get blisters; penance for everyone involved. Aziraphale was standing calm and upright, his hands loose at his sides. The pink marks from his own attempt were already fading from his skin.

Crowley hit him.

For a moment, the heavy smack of leather on skin was the only sound. It lingered in Crowley’s ears and he rolled the whip under his fingers, waiting for something to happen. Kept waiting, until Aziraphale lifted his chin an inch and said “Go on.”

There wasn’t much pleasure in it. He had lied about that. It was an unfamiliar rhythm, keeping the rough implement moving, trying to vary his swing so the blows wouldn’t all land on the same spot. Aziraphale was barely reacting, making no sound except for the tiny puffs of air pushed out of him when the whip landed, the quiet inhalations between strokes. His face was tilted up and all Crowley could see, behind him, was the reddening skin of his back and his blond hair like a halo, glowing as the moonlight caught it.

He could see what was happening. He didn’t need words for that. He could see how Aziraphale was relaxing into it, although the welts on his skin had to hurt and there was enough weight behind the whip to make him lean back into the blows or get knocked over by them. He could still see, somewhere in the tiny shift of muscles, that he was enjoying this. Crowley kept it up until the angel was making quiet little gasping noises and his own gut was twisting uncomfortably – it couldn’t be guilt, there was nothing to feel guilty _about_ , but it felt the same way. He couldn’t think of anything to say when he stopped. He just stood, until Aziraphale breathed a blissful sigh.

“Oh,” the angel said. “So _that’s_ it.”

“Apparently so.” Crowley dropped the whip onto the narrow bed. His palm was stinging. “Did it work? Do you feel closer to – you know – more holy?”

Aziraphale lifted his arms, shoulders flexing. “I’m not sure. I don’t think _closeness_ is quite the word. It’s meditative.”

“Well, so’s chanting, and nobody gets chunks torn out of them that way.”

“Did you tear chunks?” Aziraphale looked over his shoulder, trying to see his back, and ended up turning to face Crowley properly. The worry had all washed away from his eyes. Crowley’s stomach settled definitely into guilt. He wasn’t meant to make the enemy happy. He could pass it off as torture to Head Office, but he’d always know the difference.

“No, you’re fine, you’re just a little – pink. Anyway, I really must be off. Lots of tempting to do. You know how it is.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. Mind yourself on the causeway, when the tide comes in.”

Crowley flapped a hand at him. “Yeah, I’ll steal a boat from the monks.”

“Crowley!”

“What? It’s the job, I’m supposed to steal things, and break things, and generally spread inconvenience. It’s not personal.”

“Well… alright. I suppose I can’t stop you.”

“Would you want to? After that?”

Aziraphale frowned, confusion plain on his face. “What do you mean?”

“Well – that had to have hurt?”

“It did, but it was in a good way. I think. Anyway, it’s been ages, and the monks will be asleep for hours, miraculously. You could, I don’t know, stay a while. Have a chat.”

Crowley wrestled with himself for a moment, and lost. “Alright, fine. But I can’t stay long, I’m a busy demon.” He dropped himself onto the cold straw mattress and stretched his legs out, taking up most of the room. Aziraphale pulled his habit back over his shoudlers and sat primly on the edge. “You realise, of course, that we’re just cancelling each other out, _again_?”

“We’re not having this conversation, again. My mind is made up. There will be no job-sharing.”

“Wasting everyone’s time not to. Think of all the books you could be reading instead.”

Aziraphale looked at him sidelong, his face still serenely contented. “Crowley.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

It took another miracle for Crowley to get out unseen in the morning. He steered his stolen boat straight into the causeway sand, just to make himself feel better. Monasteries made his skin itch.


	2. Chapter 2

The humans invented all kinds of interesting things in the fifth millennium. New diseases, for one thing. Huge cathedrals with lovely pointed arches and gargoyles and pictures in all the windows. New places to make pilgrimage to.

Aziraphale liked the pilgrimages. It was sweet, somehow, the way crossing one little island could become the journey of a lifetime. They couldn’t even know whether the relics they went to see were real, and they walked the long miles anyway. There was something very touching about that. He made a little hobby of joining them, in his guise as a monk, when he had nothing more pressing to look after. They would get an extra swell of grace from the experience and never know about the angel in their midst.

He was on his way back from one of those trips to Canterbury when he ran into Crowley on the road.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Crowley said. “Middle of nowhere on a bloody hilltop.”

Aziraphale shook his head, stepping off the road. “It’s not exactly the middle of nowhere. There’s a big port city just over there.”

“Well, port cities, they’re not really civilisation, are they? Just a lot of sailors and dead fish.”

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Several of the Apostles were fishermen.” Crowley made a face of mingled disgust and annoyance. Aziraphale stopped himself from sighing and asked instead, “So what are _you_ doing here, in the middle of nowhere?”

“Going to Canterbury. What about you?”

“Coming back from – Oh, dear. We’re doing it again, aren’t we?”

Crowley shrugged. “I keep telling you, angel, we’re going to be doing it forever, unless we decide to work together. Your Head Office is not very bright, and really neither is mine, and any time either of us does anything the other is going to be sent along to stop them. It’s all completely pointless.”

“Not completely.” Aziraphale lifted his chin. “It’s not pointless for the humans we work on. The individuals, I mean.”

“Well, about that. I was thinking. You know, it’s all very well for the ones you work on, if you don’t turn up to bless them they can carry on with their own free choices, but if I _do_ turn up with the whole tempting business...” Crowley tilted his head, inviting Aziraphale to follow his logic. “It tends to end badly for them, when it’s all over with.”

Aziraphale sighed. “No, Crowley. It’s still a no.”

“Worth a try. You on your own? In a hurry?”

“Yes – and no, not particularly.”

“Camp here for the night?”

Aziraphale squinted at the sky. Sunset was fading to a grey dusk, and the stars beginning to show themselves. Humans wouldn’t be travelling at this time if they could help it, and that was enough reason to stop. There was no sense attracting attention. “Yes, alright.”

They made enough of a concession to blending in to gather real firewood as the moon rose, and then Crowley licked his finger and set a white-hot spark to the kindling. The fire blazed up to the overhanging branches and settled back into a steady blaze, logs crumbling into glowing coals. Crowley sprawled out on his back, his arms folded behind his head.

“So,” he said, “what’s so important about Canterbury, anyway? It’s not as if the relics there are real.”

“Some of them are,” Aziraphale corrected him, settling himself near the fire, cross-legged with his feet tucked under the folds of his habit. “The important ones.”

“That’s still not all of them. Anyway, there’s lots of churches where all the relics are fake. What’s the point of those? It’s not as if there’s any power even in the real kind.”

“Well..”

“Yeah, but not much. Not enough for all the reverence they give to them. You might as well go wash your head in a fish-pond as most of the holy wells.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “It’s not the relics that make the difference. It’s the veneration.”

“Ohhh,” Crowley drawled. “Not the action but the _intent_. Like the flagellation.”

“Well. Yes, I suppose so. In a sense. Why are you looking at me like that?”

Crowley crossed one leg over the other, still flat on his back. He watched Aziraphale through the flames, his eyes glittering. “You liked it.”

“I told you I did.”

“You _liked_ it. That wasn’t mortification of the flesh. Maybe when I make my report I shouldn’t say I was torturing you. Maybe, I should say I was _tempting_ you.”

“There was nothing of lust in that.”

“Are you sure?” Crowley was staring at him unblinking, both eyebrows raised.

Aziraphale’s lips twitched. “You can sense lust,” he pointed out. “You know it wasn’t that.”

“But I don’t know what it was. What made you look like that? I’ve tried-” He stopped himself, glancing away towards the shadowed trees.

“ _You’ve_ tried?”

Crowley shook his head in unconvincing denial. “No. Explain it to me.”

“I’m trying.” Aziraphale reached for a stick and poked at the fire, searching for the words. It wasn’t ineffable, but it was tricky. “It was like I’d been inside for a long time, somewhere dark and small and stuffy, and I stepped outside into the rain. That moment when everything opens up. But it’s not the rain itself, it’s the, the shock of it. Whatever you were thinking about before just fades away, as if you can suddenly direct your own mind again, because you’re being distracted. Which sounds paradoxical.”

“It sounds nice.” He would have expected mockery from Crowley, after a flight of fancy like that, but the demon sounds wistful. “Maybe you should ask me to do it again.”

“Maybe you should try it.”

“Oh, I don’t think it would work. Communing with Herself isn’t really an option any more.”

“Well, perhaps not Herself,” Aziraphale conceded – it was hard to argue with that, given what Crowley _was_ \- “but you could still commune with – I don’t know, Creation. We’re not _that_ different. We’re still the same _kind_.”

Crowley looked at him, grinning. “Commune with Creation. I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, straightening himself up, “perhaps I’m putting it badly. Or perhaps you’re scared to try.”

The humans could get into quite extensive theological arguments about whether Crowley’s sort – or Aziraphale’s sort, if it came to that – could laugh. One conversation with Crowley would have answered the question. He had his head tilted up as he laughed, slitted eyes turned towards Aziraphale to be sure how he was being received. “I can’t believe this. Is that really your line of attack? You’re going to shame me into it?”

Aziraphale drew his stick out of the fire. A touch of power, a twist of the will, and it frayed into a knotted whip, the kind the pilgrims used. The one he’d borrowed from the monks a decade ago had been cut so thick it could have been a bundle of belts. This was an altogether crueller thing. He’d seen them often, carried by travellers, and felt them bite when the spirit moved.

“You’re shameless,” he said. “But I am a little surprised you’re not more curious.”

Crowley groaned low in his throat. “Oh, _fine_. And you know, it might be interesting for you too.”

“What do you mean? I’ve done it before.”

“Ah, yes, with humans. Not with me.” Crowley sat up, a sinuous coiling that left him cross-legged like Aziraphale, facing him across the fire. “I’m the enemy. I wonder what it’ll feel like for you to… defeat me?”

“It will feel just like anyone else.”

“We’ll see.”

When Aziraphale let himself be scourged, to feel his mind unfurling under the pain of the blows, a moth that must struggle from the cocoon to fly – when he took that part, he stood straight and composed to accept the whip. Crowley, being Crowley, found himself a tree to hang onto. The forest had been cut back from the important roads all over the country and a fringe of saplings had grown beneath each green wall. Crowley could nearly wrap his hands around the one he picked. He settled his grip above his head and yawned, like a cat disdaining a challenger. “Let’s get it over with.”

“You need to bare your back.”

Crowley looked wryly over his shoulder, and clicked his fingers. His black robe fell down to the waist and hung there.

“Of course,” Aziraphale said, “silly of me.” He could hear the unsteadiness in his voice, and that was silly of him, too. He’d done this before. Crowley’s back looked much like anyone else’s. Pale, but most people were pale in this part of the world; skinny, but it took wealth to be fat here. He ran his hand along the falls of the whip, feeling the knots catch at his fingers.

“Are you changing your mind, angel?”

Aziraphale frowned. “I can’t quite believe I’m doing this to a demon.”

“If you don’t get on with it, you won’t be doing – _ahh!”_ He flinched from the blow, his shoulders hunching.

“Crowley? Are you alright?”

His voice was half a snarl when he answered. “Are you planning to stop at one?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, surprising himself. “No, I’m not.”

The whip snapped against Crowley’s back. It left angry welts with every stroke, each knot and strand making its own red trail across his skin. The firelight danced over the marks, making them shift like layered scales.

A stillness had come over Aziraphale, a cool mist settling over his feathers. He could hear every noise that Crowley made, see every twitch. There was Crowley and the firelight and himself, and nothing else in the world. This was the divine war, written in two bodies and a whip. This was the purpose he was made for.

The whip kept moving. Crowley hissed in serpentine agony. His hands lost their grip on the tree.

Aziraphale struck again, and watched him crumple. On his knees, Crowley scrabbled at the bark, his breath hanging loud in the air. Aziraphale watched him, merciless. The demon pressed his face against his raised arms and waited.

Aziraphale kept going. Crowley’s voice broke to whimpering and the sound lit up every nerve. He couldn’t look away from those narrow shoulders, that bowed head. The whip sang in his hand.

There was blood gleaming black on Crowley’s skin before he rasped, “Enough.”

The moment stretched between them. Aziraphale noticed for the first time that he was panting, that his body was trembling with eagerness. Blood and smoke on the cool night air. He could crush this broken creature beneath his heel.

He dropped the whip. It turned to a stick again before it hit the ground. “Enough,” he agreed, and his voice was gentle. He stepped forward by instinct, to kiss the top of Crowley’s head.

Crowley shuddered. His eyes were wet when he looked up. “Fuck you,” he said, quietly and without venom, “ _fuck_ you, that hurt.” He let go of the tree and tugged at Aziraphale’s habit instead, until Aziraphale caught on and let himself be pulled to the ground, where he could sit with his back to the tree and let Crowley cling to his shoulders and bury his face in soft wool. It was closer that Crowley had ever wanted to get before, but he supposed it must take a toll, that kind of a beating. Small wonder if he reached for the nearest comfort when it was done.

“I think it worked,” Aziraphale said. He kept on hand on the back of Crowley’s neck, stroking with his thumb; the other ended up on his bicep, being the only place above the buttocks not beaten raw.

“Told you so, angel,” Crowley said, raising his head just enough to speak. “Told you you’d like it. Tempting, I said. Pleasures of the flesh.”

Aziraphale laughed. “That doesn’t make it a sin. You know that. Creation was made to be enjoyed. You might as well tempt me with honey.”

“Have done. Was very easy.”

“That’s because honey isn’t a sin either. But I’ll tell you something else – next time you feel like taking up the whip, you’ll enjoy it more.”

Crowley peered up at him suspiciously. “Why’s that?”

“You can call it revenge.”

He got sworn at again for that, but Crowley didn’t seem to disagree.

 

**Author's Note:**

> welcome back to Happy Fun Consensual Kink with duckbunny! stick around for reciprocation next chapter or come yell at me on tumblr @duckbunny. i wrote this instead of sleeping and I can't spell properly now, I have made very poor choices and my feet are cold.


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